John Mateer has
recently published collections in Australia, South Africa and
Indonesia. His latest books are Loanwords (Fremantle Arts
Centre Press) and Makwerekwere (Zero Press, Johannesburg). In
2002 he was Asialink's writer-in-residence in Kyoto, Japan.

Ethekweni

1. The Poet

The poet, a
New South African, holds his fist out to me.

I extend
mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster.

‘Welcome
home,’ he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart.

I do
likewise, but feebly, and mutter, ‘This is strange…’

Earlier he’d
told of when they’d razed his grandmother’s house with her
inside.

In the
interrogation he’d been asked, ‘What do you think of your
comrades now?’

And he had
shouted back: ‘Every revolution has its casualties!’

But when in
gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time.

I look at my
hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing.

Why, without
reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?

2. The
Prostitute

The woman is
sitting in the doorway half in the sun.

Her face is
hidden. She’s talking to someone out of sight.

Her legs
crossed like fat fingers.

Even from
here I can see her shins are bruised

and the
white high-heels scuffed and dirty.

Though she
beckons passersby they hardly glance at her.

Then she
stands up, steps into the humid street.

Her eyes
clench against the bright.

Under her
black vest her limp, shrunken breasts.

She spots me
in the bar across the street and beckons,

insistently
beckons me like a long forgotten friend.

3. The
Tourist

They have
their hands in his pockets and around his neck.

They’ve
pinned him against the wall.

In the
public toilets there are no surveillance cameras.

The tourist
just off the plane has no witness to his struggle,

no one but
himself to testify to his calm,

how he is
telling himself, I could have been one of them,

disappointed
with the revolution…

The wall
persists, abrasive, against his cheek

as he’s
being bitten on the shoulder in this land of AIDS.

4. The
Worshippers

They’re up
from the beach, are dancing at the bus stop.

They’re
dancing, circling to the throb of the cow-hide drum.

The drummer,
head low, holds the leather heart under his arm,

pummels with
a quick pulse that is pure praise.

The women
sway and clap fast, absorbed as Rastas on an Ethiopian mountain.

On one
woman’s back, snugly bound with a blanket, an infant,

eyes wide,
cheeks jiggling, is memorizing all this.

Of their
words all I hear is the prophet’s name: Shembe Shembe Shembe.

Behind them,
on the beach where they have been since the night, other
gatherings

of Zionists,
some standing, some kneeling, clasp their hands in prayer,

their
candles now low in the sand, their bottles of holy water pale
with the breaking day.

Waist-deep
in the grey swell a man is baptizing a calm, white-robed child

while two
surfers, skirting carefully around them, enter the waves, slip
away

from that
tourist who photographs this scene with the hotels as backdrop.

Up here at
the road the worshippers are dancing and singing as if they
could forever.

In the Valley of a Thousand Hills

Valley of a
thousand hills, green as the afterimage of blood!

did you not
hear the poet’s izithakazelo or the professor’s ululating

responsive
as the earth under our feet, as the rocky hills under an echo?

Valley of a
thousand hills, green as the afterimage of blood!

did you not
speak when I answered the call defiant as a black cockatoo

and my mouth
opened to what hijacks sound: the absent, the uprooted?

Valley of a
thousand hills, green as the afterimage of blood!

I will
invoke you as the home- and heartland that isn’t mine, the
chiasm

of my
African being that, like the Ancestors in Kunene’s poem, walks
tall on the horizon.